I haven’t written anything about Daniel “Mr Burns” Ek and his cash cow Spotify for a while now, have I? So I thought I’d put that right and have a good look to see what the minted Swede has been getting up to recently.

The answer appears to involve spending very little time on social media. Perhaps he’s been busy rummaging around the backs of sofas at Spotify’s offices in Stockholm looking for a few extra hundred million dollars so he can buy Arsenal football club – just like he said he wanted to months ago?

Even more curious, however, is the fact he hasn’t tweeted anything about Spotify – bar one tweet on September 14th in reference to a podcast which he features on himself – in two months. Infact, the last thing about his non-profit making site that he mentioned was on July 29th. Two months ago today…

I’ve been getting the feeling for quite some time that Ek is getting bored of Spotify. During the pandemic, he announced he was investing nearly £1billion in deeptech – it tells you a lot about the man when at a time of hardship for the musicians on the site which made him a billionaire, he decides not to do anything to help them. An unworthy act from an unworthy person.

And of course, let’s not forget his expressions of interest – rebuffed so far – in purchasing a football club. The only part of Spotify he does show an interest in is podcasts, and given the eye-watering sums being paid to sign some of them – $25million alone for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

So far, the couple have only made one podcast, and it was their celebrity pals talking about how they spent 2020 – meaning they did almost no actual work on it! When they’re paying out such gargantuan sums of money to get this content, they have to shift a ton of advertising to break even, let alone profit.

Still, there is one piece of good news for Spotify. The British government has recommended the Competition and Markets Authority probe the major labels. I suspect it’s a prospect Daniel Ek is quite comfortable with – the heat being on the labels means the heat is off his site’s utterly abysmal payout rates…